There are many ways that you can stop the far right marching through a city, or through a community. You can organise your own march and head them off, tactics that were used recently against the DFLA (Democratic Football Lads Alliance) in London by about a thousand anti-racist, anti-fascist activists. You can barricade a street and physically stop them marching through a community as they did in 1936 in Cable Street in East London. You can make them feel unwelcome as a community and bring different groups together, this happened in the 1970s against the National Front in Lewisham, Tower Hamlets, Nottingham, and Birmingham.
Nevertheless it seems ridiculous to point out that a lot has changed since the 1930s and the 1970s and the set piece politics of ‘The March’ is more about theatre than grass roots political temperature checking. Especially in the wave of a new bourgeoisie activism that is bringing thousands of Guardian readers into central London every few months with witty and intelligent placards.
Yet the politics of class, gender, and race are happening where they have always happened, in our homes, schools, pubs, community centres and religious institutions, and these sites and networks have been extended online through social media. And the ways in which people in their communities choose to find out what is happening locally, and nationally have also changed relying on social media to have those difficult political debates, which of course you can never have. Anything that is difficult to understand or to talk about is best done face to face and in groups, or at meetings, online despite its apparent multi-dimensional approach to information is in reality very narrow, its about you and your friends, and the people and the ideas you agree with, thus creating social media bubbles, where we all think- we think the same, and when we don’t we get into a social media type of road rage, becoming aggressive, rude and angry, engaging in bullying practices and seemingly without consequence, we can become keyboard warriors.
Gas lighting the Working Class
Over the last 3 years there has been a definite change in political temperature, however it may not be as obvious as some would like it to be, on Twitter, and on Facebook the left appear jubilant, and if you only looked at those posts you would see some type of socialist revolution on the horizon with Jeremy Corbyn leading a landslide victory, with the middle class Momentum supporters from Islington riding beside him like the horse people of the socialist apocalypse. However there are other political views on Social Media that the left at best dismiss and at worse ignore. Tommy Robinson former leader of the English Defence League pumps out his own version of news from a YouTube Channel that gets over a million views regularly. In one video titled ‘Anti-Fa attacks Tommy’ there is over 1.8 million views, not that all of those viewers will be on board for a fascist regime, but still- that is a lot of people watching and engaging. This shift in politics is not just online, and in actual fact and importantly the politics of class is firmly back in working class communities, in the ways that working class people experience life, and understand their own social positions. A fact that has been totally missed by most of the left, and all of the middle class whether left or right. Working class people are angry, they see their lives and more importantly their children’s lives lived in fear and precarity while as they look up they see the middle class elbows ever sharpening and expanding. I have made this case relating to Brexit in other places, but it is worth saying again, Brexit has not caused this anger, Brexit is the consequence of class inequality deepening, while at the same time dismissed, and ignored. The British working class are being gas lighted by all of the middle class, the new left bourgeoisie, the centrist suits, and the right wing rulers.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in the rhetoric that surrounds SOME not ALL men of Pakistani heritage that have formed friendship/brotherhood groups in order to exploit, and rape some of the most vulnerable people in society poor, working class girl children. I can now hear the frantic tapping of keyboards ‘paedophiles are also white’ say some; ‘white men are more likely to be paedophiles’ say others. This is not the point, the point is that when it comes to sexual violence there is ‘no but’ or there shouldn’t be.
In some communities Telford, Rotherham, Oxford, Newcastle, Leeds, Derby, Nottingham, and many other places people have known about this for a long time, some people have known about it and spoken out, to be ignored, and others have known about it, and allowed it to continue wit that word ‘but’.
This 3 letter word ‘but’ has allowed groups of men to inflict some of the worst torture and abuse on vulnerable girl children. That word ‘but’ has allowed the police, social workers, teachers, youth workers, and community representatives, the justice system, local and national politicians to justify and enable thousands yes thousands of children to be used as sex slaves, by men of all ethnicities and religions, the men may change but their victims don’t, they are vulnerable, usually from poor families, or in the care system, and they are children.
A Class Issue
In the case of men of Pakistani heritage this is a class issue, in that both perpetrator and victim are working class, and class inequality, class prejudice and class stigma have been used in allowing this National shame to take place, in that the children, the victims were seen as little and no value, I have written about the way white working class women are demonised when they have relationships with men that are not white, the assumption that they are slags, prostitutes, and incorrigible, and this is what is at the root of the way that men of Pakistani heritage has been allowed to commit these acts. While at the same time denying the humanity of poor working class girls.
A Race Issue
Is this an issue of race, or religion, I would argue not -Pakistani men, Muslim men, black men, catholic men are NOT more likely to be paedophiles, however the way that paedophiles organise themselves, and seek each other out is of relevance, and then how they normalise their behaviour, is. If rape, abuse, and violence can be embedded by men as ‘cultural’ in a way that allows them to continue that abuse they will do so, some of you will remember ‘Pie’ Paedophile, Information Exchange that was set up in 1974 in order to make the argument that paedophilia is natural, and supported in various forms by some high ranking Labour MPs.
However where I might argue that this is an issue of race is in the way that those who had some power to stop it have behaved. And also in the way that predominantly the left who appear to have misinterpreted anti-racism by creating ‘the victim’ and treating all ethnic minority groups as one dimensional people who have nothing but their exploitation, while at the same time holding people to their ‘white privilege’ without understanding or engaging in the politics of class and gender.
Meanwhile the right wing have absolutely treated this issue as one of ‘race’ a group of Pakistani men than have been given a green light to rape white girls by ‘lefties’. The left’s response to this has been to hold their position, to be immovable, and instead of thinking the issue through, and having empathy with those communities and with those girls many of which are now mothers to mixed race children that they love, have hardened their position that this is not in any way about race, when in reality everyone apart from the victims are making this about race.
I come back to my original argument, these are difficult conversations, and conversations that are not best discussed over social media, the right wing are making much political capital online about the abuse of these children, and the left wing are shouting down anyone that wants to discuss it, by closing them down with accusations of racism. Meanwhile these conversations are being had in working class communities, and this is being used as another example for working class people in how they are being devalued, closed down, and left out. The fact is that amongst all of the middle class political, media, professional class, there are better people to tell those working class stories, as the working class cannot be trusted to tell those stories themselves, they will get it wrong, they will be racist. And so yet again it is being left (no pun intended) to the middle class to set the narrative, a narrative that is not being recognised by working class people about their lives, and the right wing are making hay while the gaslight shines.
And so I ask you again how do we stop the far right from marching.